Mission

by Paul Forrester-O'Neill

  By the time John left on that January night, with his packed bag and his winter boots, Dwayne was pacing the sidewalk outside the bar non-stop. His mouth was dry, his shoulders jerked and the first onset of chest pains were pressing down on his sternum like an anvil. He couldn’t think straight. He’d lost weight. His heart rate had boosted, so too his blood pressure. He wanted sex all the time. Any kind, blowjobs, hand-jobs, anything. And still he couldn’t figure any of it, even if he could’ve sat down long enough to try.

  At eight o’clock the following morning, with the snow having coated most of the neighbourhood, Dwayne would walk downstairs and sit at the breakfast table. After less than five hours’ sleep, his eyes would appear small and bloodshot and he would rub them incessantly. In the quiet of the day, he would listen out for John to come down so that they could take their proteins and drinks together. After almost an hour of waiting, with his teeth beginning to grind, he would stand, shuffle over to the refrigerator and the small kitchen cupboard and take his own pills and supplements. He would go upstairs then. He would wait outside the young man’s room and, with his pupils dilating with the passing of each second, he’d look inside. The bed would be slept in but no longer warm, the pillow lacking indentation. The wardrobe door would be slightly ajar, with some things missing, some things moved. Dwayne didn’t know. He couldn’t think. Close to the window with the drapes still drawn, the boxing gloves hung on the wall, almost as shiny as the day they arrived.

  To begin with, John drifted. He rode the freight trains. He slept wherever he found himself, in the rackety cars themselves, in barns, outbuildings or beach houses he broke into if they were empty. Sometimes he found work; mostly outdoors, fruit picking, or farm labour, mostly for money to live on alongside what he’d stolen from his mother’s purse, but in those places where something to eat and somewhere to sleep was part of the payment, it was as much to fill the hours of the day, and for those days to fill his week, and the weeks to fill his months. And so on.

  Sometimes he found somewhere and stayed longer. He found rooms in run-down neighbourhoods, or small, cheap apartments he shared often with vermin and bugs. He lived simply. He practised his chess moves, got to know most constellations and where and when to find them. He could remember the periodic table, the presidents, the states and, on a good day, the capitals, alphabetically. He could distinguish a male rat from a female, delineate birdsong, chronicle rust. He could, with his crooked snout, ascertain foodstuffs to a high level of precision. He collected an assortment of objects that might someday be of use to him, usually those small enough to keep in a pocket or a shoe. And he read, often for hours at a stretch, often through the night with the sounds of chaos all around him, gorging on one encyclopaedic page after another.

  He was almost wordless, like an animal.

  He headed south to the Florida sun, got work cleaning cars on beachfront forecourts, making them spotless inside and out. His hands smelled of cherry wax and damp leather, his clothes of industrial soap. He was, also, over a period of time, an assistant lifeguard, a croupier, an Everglades guide and, for a short time only, at a number of Disney or quasi-Disney locations whose noise, colour and show he grew to quietly despise, he was a hot, large-headed, roly-poly bundle of Mouse-, Duck-, or Dwarf-like jollity.

  Until he moved again. This time across country, to California where work and places to stay were easy to find. He spent an entire winter in one empty beach house after another, never for longer than a week at a time and always leaving them as he found them, even down to washing the towels and sheets. He waited tables, tended a string of bars and clubs along the strips, and then one night, a quieter than usual Monday in one of the downtown places, he was offered permanent, if unusual, work from a silver-haired man in a black suit who sat at the counter.

  “You don’t give anything away, do you?” the man said, leaning in.

  John looked at him, and raised, minutely, a single eyebrow.

  “I’ve seen you,” he said. “I’ve seen you work. Nothing you have is shown, nothing slips out. If there is anything there, and I’m assuming there is, then none of it is for public consumption, not what you think, not what you feel, not what you know. And I like that.” He checked no-one was listening, lowered his voice to a purr. “How would you like to come and work for me? I’ve just got rid of someone for smiling too much. I need a Buster Keaton. Do you know Buster Keaton? Are you familiar with his modus operandi?”

  John nodded, once, remembered the encyclopaedia page. He served another customer, then went back to the man whose long, slender fingers drummed on the counter.

  “What’s the work?” he said.

  “My name is Mario. I’m a magician. And I need an assistant.”

  For John Cassidy and his lizard-like stillness, it was second nature. He became, comfortably, that unflappable, stony-faced assistant that Mario was looking for. After a probationary month of practice and rehearsal, the performances began, weekly certainly, sometimes daily and occasionally twice daily during which time, black-suited, white-shirted, bow-tied and wordless, he was, amongst other things, pinned by knives, spun on a wheel, mesmerised, and sawn in half.

  They played up and down the strip mostly; bars, private gatherings, weddings and birthdays. He was the silent figure from whom Mario would remove a host of watches and coins, of necklaces, bracelets and keys and a myriad of other audience valuables. He was the storer of rabbits, doves and mice, the cache of floribundas, real or otherwise. And he didn’t smile, didn’t break. He never once gave anything away, not even the deep and quiet relish for the blindfold as it chicaned over his crooked nose with a slide of warm cloth.

  After a couple of months, he moved into an annexe of Mario’s house up in the hills. He ran errands for him, drove him around. He fixed things. He answered any fan mail, slipping the signed photographs inside the envelopes. He cooked for him, using his crooked snout for his mixtures and blends. Sometimes they’d have days together, they’d spend whole evenings in the house watching silent, black-and-white movies to see how people moved, how they communicated without speaking, how the audience knew what was happening without a word being spoken. They worked on moves, on stagecraft and blocking, on the perfectly executed mimes where meanings were gauged by gestures the other understood, like a language they had between them. They spent two Christmases together, New Year, Thanksgiving Days, and the four birthdays. But there was a stipulation. They were not to become friends. They were not to get to know each other, and on those Christmases and birthdays, they were not to give presents. Mario was insistent. “The act,” he said, “will suffer. You are my assistant. That is what the audience believes. The spell is lost if they don’t. It’s called persuasion.”

  And that was how it worked, for two years. A professional relationship. They were not noticeably elder and junior, nor master and servant. They were neither companions nor confederates. But there was something John felt in the buzz of the magician’s presence, in the sensation of trust he had as the knives flew towards him, that took him back to the feelings he had when his father was there, when he reached up for his hand or scampered alongside him, those feelings he could never put into words as a child of five years old.

  That was until, one late summer day, without any word of warning, Mario perfected the ultimate act and disappeared, without trace. As if in a puff of clear, white smoke, he was gone. Gone from the house in the hills. Gone from the strips and the bars. Gone from the city itself. There was no letter, no explanation. The house was left the way it was. Nothing had been taken. The car was still in the garage. And the wheel and the knives and the menagerie of rabbits and doves and mice were untouched.

  There were rumours of tax evasion, of sex scandals, Mafia links, illness, wagers, rivals, magic itself and even suicide, but whatever it was, John Cassidy, stony-faced and whey-toned, standing outside the annexe with some of its contents stuffed into his pockets, felt abandoned, again, felt that same punch to the gut he’d felt all those years ag
o.

  He moved out of the annexe as soon as the place had been searched and foul-play discounted. He bummed around the city awhile. On the day he left he had the words Restless and Fearless tattooed on each shoulder blade and, without the stability that being rotated, dismembered and put back together again brought, he became random again.

  His hearing was out, his sense of smell scrambled. Breaking into those beach houses got beyond him, in spite of the hatpins he’d acquired. The barns and outbuildings he slept in were riddled with animals he caught only glances of. Most of the time, day or night, he was a just a figure in the landscape, a shambling, shuffling shape with old boots, a packed bag and a peacoat, making his way from one place to the next against skies bellied daylong with snow and rain. The money he had, saved or stolen, he rarely used. He stitched it into the bag he carried, as if it was there for something other than living with.

  As the months passed, so, given the long days and nights and the absence of Mario to wordlessly guide him, given the ache of that abandonment, he began increasingly to think of his father. Actually, he didn’t think about his father. It was more that the thoughts that started to happen around the misty, half-remembered image of him, like where he was, where he’d been to, what he looked like and why did he leave him behind so easily, wouldn’t go away. And neither would that curdle in his gut.

  One evening in the mid-March of his twenty-fourth year, he was on the empty parking lot of an industrial park somewhere on the edge of a mid-eastern town. His face, arms and back were bruised where he’d been half-beaten and his own knuckles and fists were cut and skinned where he’d fought back. His pockets felt laden with watches and coins, with lockets and keys that rattled with each step he took. A light, brick-dusted rain started to fall. There was a phone booth on a street corner and he shuffled towards it. He gathered his coins. Outside a scrawny, three-legged dog sniffed at a dumpster. As he stood there, he wanted only for the blindfold to be pulled down over his eyes and for the world to go soft and dark and quiet.

  “Mom,” he said, “I need help.”

  His mother wheezed, and then spoke as if seamlessly trailing a conversation from somewhere beyond that seven-year absence.

  “What the hell do I care?” she said. “What do I care what you need? I don’t. And that’s the truth. You put me where I am. You steal from me. You make my life a misery. You put a spoke in it the day you came out, you little bastard.”

  A car drove past the phone booth, slowed up a little.

  “And what did you do to Dwayne? You fucked him up, that’s what you did. I don’t know how, but you did, and now they give him all kinds of names and lock him away and won’t let him out because they say he’s got too much shit in his system. I know Dwayne, and Dwayne never had too much shit in his system. So, whatever it is that you want, you won’t get it from me. I don’t have it. And if I did, you would be the last person I’d give it to. So why don’t you try that old, dying father of yours? Why don’t you try him? Did you know he’d got land up in the north-west? He never told me once he’d got land. And if he’s got land, he’s got money, so try him for whatever it is you want. Go and ask that fucking shirt-seller I wish I’d never met for it,” she said, and wheezed again like a spent balloon.

  John closed his eyes. He went back to that same winter’s day when he was five years old. He got the snow and the swollen glisten of the sky. He got the winter boots, the packed bag at his feet. He got his hands on his knees and the sore, drying saltiness of his face and the crunch of the tyres through the padded whiteness. He got the faint smell of the coffee and the thought, loose-formed, but intact enough, that from those moments on, his life would never be the same.

  He hung around the town for a few days, walking the neighbourhoods with the randomness of a dice-roll, not because he liked the place, or because of all the people he’d come across, worked with, slept with, shaken large, bloated hands with or been sawn in half by, the people of this town were kinder and showed him more understanding than anywhere else, but because he didn’t know what else to do.

  He tried to figure how such a young life had been cast into a wilderness from which he struggled to return, to figure why it was he didn’t have enough warmth in his heart or how he’d driven Dwayne into that world of derangement with such calculation. And he tried, more than anything, with the haul of his packed bag and the rattle of chains and pins, to figure how he could even think of seeing, never mind speak to or share time with or be in the same room as, the man who’d left him behind, who’d walked out of his life on that winter’s day almost twenty years before and left him to rot. And no, he didn’t know he’d got land.

  On the fourth day, when the reasons to stay had become as threadbare as his old, frayed laces, he started to walk out. And if the direction happened to be towards the north-west of the country, towards the foothills of the Cascade Mountains and the town of Mission, if that was where he was drawn, like a moth to a flame, then so be it.

  Heading west across the north of the country you’d start to leave the towns and the cities behind. You’d forego the power plants and the car factories, the acreage of business parks, the urban and suburban neighbourhoods, the relentless noise and movement you might only notice had gone in the hush of dusk somewhere. You might start to notice that all the goods and the freight, the people and the cars were all going in the opposite direction and you’d sense, in the slow curve north, the lengthening hours of light and the broadening of sky and the starlit bowl of night so vast and open you felt like you were right there in it.

  You’d catch the great patchworks of earth then, the squares of rich-red soil stitched next to those smaller shapes of Indian land upon which little had ever grown. And, strung onto those rough-edged sections of land, like velvet next to sackcloth, would be the miles and miles of prairie that would stretch as far as you could see. You’d make out the start of the low-lying hills, like lions’ paws lounged across the land so that the single highway that the network of roads from the east had become, would move a long arc around them, sometimes rising, sometimes as flat as a pan base.

  Sometimes the rains would come, blown in on stronger winds. The clouds would move in over the land like mobsters, smothering it suddenly in predatory shade. Hours of rain would be deposited, heavy to begin with, hardly visible through, veiling the corn and wheat-fields like the trawling of stained lace, hammering the land, pounding like fists on any fluted rooftop of any outbuilding, holding or barn. The old, dried riverbeds and creeks would start to run again, coursing clear or clay-brown under rook-black skies, scuttling in rivulets, loosening scree and wood until those hours would pass and the squalls of rain would ease and lighten and stop.

  And when those hours had stopped, whether it was day-break, noon or dusk, or whether milky stars were blinking out in the darkness, you’d be further out. You’d be in places it was rare to travel to, places you wouldn’t go to just for the sake of it. And the further out you were, towards the sandstone and granite foothills of the Cascades that stood between land and eventual sea, you’d have to have reasons to be there, you’d have a particular purpose in mind.

  After three days of cars and trucks and station wagons, next to workmen in overalls and caps, to college kids, salesmen, off-duty firemen, medics and dogs, in no particular order, and to whom, if they ever asked him where he was heading and why, he said little in terms of direction and nothing in terms of reason, he took the last hundred miles by train. The closer he got to the town of Mission, the more his heart rate began to increase. The moisture lessened in his mouth and gathered instead on the palms of his hands. His synapses began to zing, the serotonin levels, the endorphins, the dopamine, all thrown into a mounting chaos. His gut swam and his vision blurred. By the time he got there, hungry, thirsty and tired, in the early evening of light rain, his system had more or less closed down. He became a heap, a sack, a bag of bones retching up little but strings of acid bile. He couldn’t walk out of the station, which is how come he wa
s on the floor of the waiting room when they found him, the packed bag as a pillow, the old coat not worn, but draped over him.

  The old hatchback bumped its way over the unmade track that skewed from the end of the homesteads to the highway, its headlights jerking through the dusk. It took a right then, heading clockwise on the half-circle of road, running along the base of Rupture Hill and arcing south past the tended spread of the Mallender estate, the wooded girth of Blessings Point and the Indian burial grounds until it sidled up to the rail-tracks that made the same symmetrical curve from the prairies to the east.

  It made the turn into the rutted side-road, the rove of its lights picking out diners in Sizzlin’ Steve’s steak-house, including, on that spring evening, amongst others, Ted Mallender, head of the Land Management Agency and the most influential man in Mission, his considerably younger wife, Lily, Ned Scarratt, Chief of Police, and Rita Mahoonie who sat in the corner with her friend Delilah with one eye on her rare to bleeding steak and the other on the two young law enforcement officers sitting with Ned.

  The shacks of the migrant houses were single storey with asbestos roofs and walls no thicker than Rita’s 8oz steak. Built as part of a scheme to attract extra workers to the town over fifty years ago, they had scarcely been touched since and so had the perennial look of temporary shelters for people made homeless by an elemental force rather than places to be proud of, to house decent furniture that could stand the test of winter and electrical goods that didn’t zap the fuse-box at least twice a day.